Tackling Grand Challenges with Competition Law: Lessons from the Pandemic

All across the globe antitrust authorities responded quickly, determined to tackle the worst impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak. While regulators and courts can apply competition and antitrust rules both as enforcing “swords” to achieve public health goals and “enabling” shields to promote specific collaborations, it appears that the “enabling collaborations” function has been particularly important to rapidly facilitate much needed pandemic responses. This chapter describes these developments from a past, present and future perspective. Specifically, it analyses (1) the interaction between competition law and public health, (2) the immediate response of antitrust authorities during the crisis, and (3) new approaches and solutions models. Special emphasis will be placed on the question of whether current pandemic responses could provide competition authorities a future blueprint and toolkit for action and a new role in the public ecosystem to implement needed sustainable development objectives.